The Pot Calls The Kettle Black

Barack Obama says David Cameron allowed Libya to become a ‘ hit show'

Barack Obama has sharply criticised David Cameron for the UK’s role in allowing Libya to become a “shit show” after the fall of the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in an unprecedented attack on a British leader by a serving US President.

Mr Obama said that following a successful military intervention to aid rebels during the 2011 Arab Spring revolt, Libya was left to spiral out of control – due largely to the inaction of America’s European allies.

In a candid US magazine interview, Mr Obama said: “When I go back and I ask myself what went wrong… there’s room for criticism, because I had more faith in the Europeans, given Libya’s proximity, being invested in the follow-up.”

Singling out the British Prime Minister, he suggested that Mr Cameron had taken his eye off Libya after being “distracted by a range of other things”.

Mr Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French President, pushed hard for the bombing raids on Colonel Gaddafi’s forces that led to his fall, but since 2011 Libya has sunk further into violence and civil war, and latterly has become a focal point for Isis in North Africa.

Mr Obama went on: “We actually executed this plan as well as I could have expected: We got a UN mandate, we built a coalition, it cost us $1bn – which, when it comes to military operations, is very cheap. We averted large-scale civilian casualties, we prevented what almost surely would have been a prolonged and bloody civil conflict. And despite all that, Libya is a mess.”

Referring to that mess in private, Mr Obama reportedly uses the more colourful term, “shit show”.

A Libyan fireman stands in front of an oil storage tank at an oil facility in northern Libya’s Ras Lanouf region in February, after it was set ablaze following attacks launched by Isis jihadists (AP)

The comments will be a severe embarrassment to Mr Cameron, who has often been forced to defend British involvement in Libya on the grounds that Western intervention helped to avert a bloodbath. They will also place strain on the transatlantic alliance as coalition forces target Isis positions in Syria and Iraq.

Mr Cameron’s spokeswoman said he had frequently made clear that he still believed military action in Libya was “absolutely the right thing to do” and stressed that the Government had put support for the country on the agenda when the UK hosted a meeting of G8 leaders in 2013.

She said: “We would share the President’s assessment that there are real challenges in Libya. That’s why we are continuing to work hard with international partners to support a process in Libya that puts in place a government that can bring stability, and why we are talking about how we can support such a government in the future.”

Speaking at length to The Atlantic, Mr Obama revealed that the Prime Minister had risked damaging the countries’ “special relationship” by delaying an increase in defence spending to meet a Nato target of 2 per cent of GDP. Alluding to Mr Cameron’s foot-dragging, Mr Obama said: “Free riders aggravate me.”

Dave Brown on Barack Obama

When the two came face to face at the G7 summit in June 2015, Mr Obama told Mr Cameron: “You have to pay your fair share.” The next month, Chancellor George Osborne’s summer Budget included a defence spending rise.

Mr Obama also said Mr Cameron’s failures had affected his decision not to enforce a “red line” over President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons during the Syrian civil war. The President had planned a strike against Assad’s forces in August 2013, following a deadly sarin gas attack by the regime on civilians in a Damascus suburb. The strike was called off at the 11th hour. One “major factor” in the decision, the President said, “was the failure of Cameron to obtain the consent of his Parliament” for military action.

During his White House tenure, Mr Obama explained, he has tried to encourage other nations to act in international matters without always waiting for the US to take the lead.

“It was precisely to prevent the Europeans and the Arab states from holding our coats while we did all the fighting that we, by design, insisted” that they spearhead the Libyan intervention, he said, describing the strategy as “part of the anti-free rider campaign”.

Mr Obama also said Mr Sarkozy, who left office the year after the Libyan intervention, had been keen to “trumpet” France’s involvement. The White House allowed him to take disproportionate credit for the air strikes, thus “[purchasing] France’s involvement in a way that made it less expensive and less risky for us,” Mr Obama said.

‘US-led invasion of Libya opened up massive arsenals to terrorists’ - Chris Hedges

The destruction of Libya, Iraq and Syria as unified states generated Islamist radical groups in the Middle East, which create havoc, said investigative journalist Chris Hedges. This was caused by the invasion of outside forces, he added.

RT:How much of a threat does Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) pose in Tunisia?

Chris Hedges: It is probably not an existential threat, but it is a threat, because after the US overthrow of [Muammar] Gaddafi it essentially opened up these massive Libyan arsenals to a series of groups reaching all the way down into Sub-Saharan Africa – countries like Mali. So you have provided one logistical base, because these militants are based just over the border in Libya, along the border with Tunisia; and it has provided weapons by which they can carry out attacks. Of course it has also provided training.

The destruction of Libya as a unified state - like the destruction of Iraq and Syria - has spawned these groups that can create significant havoc inside countries in the region, and that is what we’re seeing.

RT: Tunisia has built a new 200 kilometer barrier on the Libyan border to stop ISIL. Will this help?

CH: That is a long border. I don’t know how long it is, but I have been there. It is going to be pretty hard to keep ISIS out; it is a remote, often inaccessible, porous border. So I expect to see more attacks like this one.

RT:Have the US air strikes against ISIL in Libya had any impact?

CH: I think the problem is, as we have seen, with the attacks against IS in Iraq and Syria that unless you can occupy the territory you can certainly damage and to a certain extent cripple these movements. But as long as they control the ground, as long as they are able to operate within vast swaths of territory, air campaigns are not going to be able to stop them. And that has just been proven over and over – the Israelis tried that a few years ago in Southern Lebanon and it didn’t work out very well for them.

RT:A US commander recently admitted that Libya is turning into a failed state. Could Tunisia go the same way?

CH: No, I think that the failed states are largely created by the destruction of central authority on the part of outside forces. We saw that with the US invasion of Iraq; we saw that with the decision - not only by the US, but by its allies the Saudis, the Qataris and others - to arm and fund the insurgent groups within Syria; we saw that with the overthrow of Gaddafi. I don’t see that happening in Tunisia. However the creation of a failed state on the border of Tunisia is certainly going to create significant problems, because these armed jihadists have the tools and the space to carry out almost unlimited attacks inside Tunisia.

RT:The US is considering a deeper military involvement in Libya. How could that change the situation in the region?

CH: It’s not just Tunisia. They are moving into all sorts of states around Libya, including in Egypt. You have a significant number of Tunisian jihadists who have already flooded into Iraq and Syria. And if we go back far enough, Afghanistan. So there is a network by which ISIS can draw on in order to attempt to create havoc inside Tunisia.

I wouldn’t say Tunisia is necessarily the next target, I’d say it is one of several targets, and the capacity that ISIS has to disrupt life in Tunisia is significant. I don’t think we can speak about Tunisia becoming an Islamic state – and that is what I mean by saying it is not an existential threat to Tunisia – but it certainly can deeply disrupt life within Tunisia.

52 comments:

Obama and Clinton own Libya, but it gets worse> The weaponry that ended up in Syria and all of it used by ISIS in Iraq was “Made in USA”.

George Bush was a total fuck up, but it is inexplicable to me that Clinton and Obama did not learn the lesson that the Neocon dream was a nightmare and went on to initiate Iraq 2.0 in Libya and 3.0 in Syria.

Heidi Nelson Cruz, Ted’s wife, is the daughter of Seventh-day Adventist missionaries, explaining why she spent part of her childhood traveling with her parents to places like Kenya. “Speaking in Tongues” Religion reporter Sarah Pulliam Bailey, writing in the Washington Post on March 25, 2015, was of the first to recognize Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign logo and the purifying tongue-of-fire logo used commonly to identify Pentecostal churches.

Rafael Cruz is a pastor with Purifying Fire International Ministry, although in January 2014, as Ted Cruz was preparing his presidential swing, Rafael Cruz scrapped the group’s website after various blogs began identifying the ministry as rooted in “a radical Christian ideology known as Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism.”

Dominionism calls on anointed Christian leaders to take over government to make the laws of the nation in accordance with Biblical laws. Rafael Cruz, at the Pastor Larry Huch’s New Beginnings mega-church in Bedford Texas, outside Dallas, on Aug. 26, 2012, in a Dominionist sermon proclaimed his son, Ted Cruz, to be the “anointed one,” a Dominionist Messiah who would bring God’s law to reign.

GENEVA - Iran executed nearly 1,000 prisoners last year, the highest number in two decades, and hundreds of journalists, activists and opposition figures languish in custody, a United Nations investigator said on Thursday.

Ahmed Shaheed, UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, voiced particular concern about executions for crimes committed by children under 18. This was "strictly and unequivocally prohibited under international law."

Today Hamas announced it will divert all concrete, labor and supplies FROM their 1 billion dollar tunnel project to spearhead a new home, sewer and power distribution system,. Hamas announced that their NEW priority was improving their citizens standard of living...

Hamas praised the wave of violent attacks across Israel on Tuesday, that left one U.S. tourist dead and 14 Israelis injured, as “heroic.”

In one attack, a Palestinian from the West Bank city of Qalqilya stabbed an American tourist to death and injured nine others in a stabbing spree on a boardwalk in the port town of Jaffa, near the coastal city of Tel Aviv.

“Hamas congratulates the three heroic operations this evening, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Jaffa, and considers this proof of the failure for all these theories to abort the Intifada (uprising), which will continue until the realization of its goals,” Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said in a statement released on Tuesday.

Hamas has declared that the recent terror attacks committed by Palestinians in Israeli settlements in the West Bank show that "the next phase of the ‘Jerusalem intifada’ will cause great fear among settlers, who will no longer enjoy security."

In a press statement released on Thursday, Hamas Spokesman Husam Badran praised the two stabbing attacks and the shooting attack that took place Wednesday in Nablus that resulted in the injuring of three IDF soldiers.

Badran said that the recurrent infiltrations by Palestinians into Israeli settlements, and the stabbing and shooting attacks they carry out inside, signal that the next phase of the intifada will sow fear among settlement residents.

He added that Palestinians know that the settlements are Israel's weak point, which means that "they would carry out new forms of courageous attacks by infiltrating these settlements."

"In the next days, the West Bank's settlers will witness additional surprises from Hamas," Badran further stated.

It aint about jobs or hope quirk, it's about blood lust for murder of Jews.

Quirk practiced the high art of 'changing reality' in the advertising business, and it's stayed with him.

Is all I can figure.

Why he'd want to do that concerning the Arabstinians, I can't imagine.

Quirk is highly intelligent but can't seem to comprehend what:

"First we show the Poles, then everybody else" really implies.

Martha Gellhorn, who said the media of Arabstinia is 'one long scream of hate' would pick up on it.

Her article was written, IIRC, before the '67 War.

I don't recall a word in that article about Arabs bitching about job opportunities, and equal employment. It was all about them wanting to kill somebody, even one another if no other target was easily available.

I noticed the Gazans pushing one another off high buildings, shooting one another and such several times in recent history.

I much prefer the laid back highly monied Christianity of The Donald, who knows zero about the Bible, but who had a butler, now retired, that swears by the man, describing him as giving, compassionate, friendly, humble and kind.

Always be humble and kind, as the song says.

He says the TV Donald isn't the 'real' Donald, a sentiment echoed by Ben Carson.

*****

Bless me, but I can't find a word about fighting for Equal Employment Opportunities in the Koran.

I do find a lot about making people pay the unbelievers tax, and having others do the work.

From, WiO's Alternate History of the World, the Universe, and Everything Else

Unicorn Press: 1986

Hamas and ISIS are enemies. Hamas is the only reason ISIS hasn't taken over in Gaza.

rather than trying to understand nothing that you do not understand you use ridicule and attempt to defame others.

Hamas and Isis are BOTH Islamic terror groups, both seek the murder of every Jew in the world, both seek the destruction of the ONLY Jewish State on the planet. Both execute their own citizens and will kidnap, torture and rape their enemies. Both have taken territories by violence. Both have strict Islamic codes that drive them.

Just because the compete to be top dog doesn't make them different.

It's like calling saying the Dallas Cowboys and the NY Jets are enemies.

Both are members in good standing of the NFL.

Hamas, ISIS, Moslem Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Boko Haram are ALL members of the same league.

Might I suggest you lift up your head from the Reader's Digest Version of Terrorists and learn a few things before continuing to embarrass yourself as a person speaking above their pay grade?

You phony, you just proved my point. Israel's strategy may be long-term and hegemonic but it's tactics are all short-term. You whine about ISIS and Hamas but just like the Israeli government you offer these up as straw men.

The only you talk about ISIS is because they are an enemy of the US. You could give a shit about them and Israel could give a shit about them. At least right now. Someday? Well...

Same with Hamas. Hamas is contained. Sure, Israel has to go in and 'mow the grass' occasionally but they don't seem to have any angst regarding it. The individuals doing the stabbings in the WB and Jerusalem are of more concern to Israel than Hamas just because they are so random. Besides, if Israel didn't have Hamas they would have to invent them. They provide the perfect foil, the excuse for nt giving the Palestinians their own state.

Through the 90's, all Israel could talk about was Iraq right up to the point that we destroyed the country. Now all they talk about is Iran as the Great Satan. This followed by Assad and/or Hezbollah. They don't give a shit about ISIS or the fact that the US is fighting them and in fact they provide support.

So please don't waste our time with you comparisons Hamas to ISIS. You know it's all bullshit.

It's getting hard to think of a subject on which Trump hasn't flip-flopped......

Trump: We’ll need tens of thousands of boots on the ground to crush ISIS

posted at 10:41 am on March 11, 2016 by Ed Morrissey

Donald Trump provided a few surprises last night, mainly in his more statesmanlike demeanor, but one answer in particular looked more like an abrupt about-face. Trump has positioned himself as less interventionist abroad, deriding George W. Bush for the war in Iraq in particular, and occasionally has suggested that we leave ISIS to the Arabs. Last night, however, Trump insisted that the US needs to put boots on the ground to crush ISIS, and not just a few special-operations boots either:

GOP frontrunner Donald Trump suggested at Thursday’s CNN Republican presidential debate in Miami that he would be willing to support a massive ground force to take on ISIS.

This is a shift for Trump, who has, as a presidential candidate, often portrayed himself as less hawkish than his Republican opponents.

Trump made the troop comment in response to a moderator’s question as to whether he would follow a military commander’s advice to increase the number of ground troops to fight the terrorist group.

“We really have no choice,” Trump said. “We have to knock out ISIS. We have to knock the hell out of them. We have to get rid of it and then we have to come back here and rebuild our country, which is falling apart.”

Radio host Hugh Hewitt pressed on specific numbers.

“I would listen to the generals,” Trump said, “but I would – I’m hearing numbers of 20 to 30,000. We have to knock them out fast.”

How much of a flip-flop is this? It’s hard to tell, because Trump has been hard to pin down on this point. Last May, he bragged to Greta van Susteren that he had a foolproof plan to defeat ISIS, but that he didn’t want to publicize it. “I don’t want the enemy to know what I’m doing,” he explained, “but there is a method of defeating them quickly and having total victory.” On the other hand, Trump railed against the Bushes for getting the US involved in a ground war in Iraq in 2003 just this past January, picking up on the false “Bush lied” meme that anti-war activists use to push isolationism. It certainly represents a tonal shift from Trump’s earlier embrace of war skeptics and rejection of traditional Republican interventionist policies.

If nothing else, this position of putting 20-30K boots on the ground shows some recognition of reality when it comes to defeating ISIS, although that’s hardly a secret plan. Defense and counterterrorism experts have discussed that figure for two years, and even some higher numbers than that. Even the White House acknowledges that such a force could succeed in dislodging ISIS from its current strongholds, but claims that it would make little overall difference and that it would encourage ISIS recruitment to have American boots on the ground. The only way to defeat ISIS is to surround it and take away its territory, and the only way to do that is to field an army sufficient to the mission. Whether those are American boots, or Saudi, or even Martian, that’s the only way to defeat an entrenched infantry and a quasi-state. Until someone does that, ISIS will continue to exist, metastasize, and threaten the rest of the world.

Fox News’ Catherine Herridge has another groundbreaking story on the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server. Herridge quotes an unnamed source who says the immunity deal with IT specialist Bryan Pagliano has provided investigators with a road map to sort out who had access to the system and when:

“Bryan Pagliano is a devastating witness and, as the webmaster, knows exactly who had access to [Clinton’s] computer and devices at specific times. His importance to this case cannot be over-emphasized,” the intelligence source said.

The source, who is not authorized to speak on the record due to the sensitivity of the ongoing investigation, said Pagliano has provided information allowing investigators to knit together the emails with other evidence, including images of Clinton on the road as secretary of state.

It’s not completely clear why the FBI is looking at who was using the system at any given time. Maybe this is just a way to confirm who sent the highly classified emails. Clinton announced last March that she had judged a little more than half of the emails on the server to be private and had them deleted, so there could be gaps in the record that would be explained by these deletions. In any case, the blockbuster quote in this story may be this one:

“Mrs. Clinton sending them in this instance would show her intent much more than would receiving [them],” the source said. “Hillary Clinton was at a minimum grossly negligent in her handling of NDI [National Defense Information] materials merely by her insisting that she utilize a private server versus a [U.S. government] server. Remember, NDI does not have to be classified.” According to the Congressional Research Service, NDI is broadly defined to include “information that they have reason to know could be used to harm the national security.”

Earlier this week I pointed out that one of the legal standards under which Hillary is being judged is possible “gross negligence” in her handling of classified information. This intelligence source being quoted by Herridge is saying she “at a minimum” she crossed that line. If so then one would expect the FBI would recommend further action when it lays out the case to the DOJ.

If nothing else, Herridge’s report demonstrates that there are people close to the FBI investigation who think the evidence is not in Clinton’s favor. As discussed in my previous post, that does not mean she will be indicted and forced to drop out of the presidential race, but it may mean this is not going as well for her at the FBI as Clinton continues to insist it is.

Salem-News.com Foreign AffairsReport says ISIS has extended oil production in oil fields in Iraq and Syria and are exporting around the clock.

(SALEM, Ore.) - The London-published Al-Araby Al-Jadeed newspaper has provided information about sales of Iraqi oil to Turkey and Israel through ISIS, in a report provided by an Iraqi intelligence colonel.

Alwaie News quoted Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, saying ISIS is funded by 40 countries including some 20G member states, emphasizing that the world is again looking at ISIS' largest revenue source: selling Iraqi and Syrian oil.

In its report, Al Arabiya newspaper noted that this information has been provided by the Iraqi Kurdistan regional government, security officials and the personnel who operate the Ibrahim Khalil border located on the border of Turkey with Kurdistan, as well as oil firms buying ISIS oil.

According to this report, ISIS has extended oil production in oil fields in Iraq and Syria around the clock,and tankers transfer a part of the oil of these areas to the city of "Zakho" located 88 kilometers east of Mosul, and sell to the highest bids.

In these deals buyers usually pay 10 to 25 percent of the oil money in cash and the rest is paid upon delivery in Turkey. In this location tanker drivers leave their tankers to other drivers who can pass through to Turkey and return to ISIS areas with empty tankers.

Oil bought from ISIS is sent to Turkey as the oil bought from Iraq and after arriving in Turkey, is emptied in silos, and in coordination with the Turkish Intelligence Service (MIT), sold at cheap prices on Mediterranean shores to European and Israeli consumers as northern Iraq oil.

Given the number of oil tankers traveling daily from Iraq to Turkey, it seems that ISIS produces about 55 to 60 thousand oil barrels per day and sells for the price of $15-$13 dollars per barrel.

According to a report from Greenwich University, there is a significant relationship between ISIS military gains and its oil exports through Turkey ports.

According to the Israel international oil company, officials working with Turkish companies say they sell every ISIS oil barrel for $30-$35 dollars to European countries. This Israeli authority claims “If there was no Israel, most ISIS oil remained in Syria, Iraq and Turkey.”

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Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.